Keeping your data organized is hard. Keeping your data organized across many devices is harder.

Today, I’m going to show you how to keep your calendar, contacts and email in sync across devices using Google as the glue. As a bonus, I’ll even tell you how to have your files and notes everywhere too. Be advised that some of the puzzle pieces here are subscription based and cost money — things that work well usually do.

My data is stored across three applications on OS X: Mail, iCal and Address Book. They’re simple, fast and to the point. Email is painless to access across devices because of IMAP and its quick using IDLE, but calendar and contacts get tricky. Address Book is unique insofar as it has built-in support for Google syncing out of the box. It does, however, have a knack for forgetting to continue syncing after a while. iCal is the big one for most people and there are ways to rig syncing for free using CalDAV and tools like Calaboration. It quickly becomes a mess and is beyond most people; be sure you have backups of your data before trying.

With your Gmail or Google Apps email account, you’ve already got Google Calendar and Google Contacts. With these, you’ll be able to access contacts and calendar using any web browser, as well as push syncing on Android smartphones and iPhone.

Getting your data into Google’s cloud services is simple with the help of Spanning Sync. It installs on your Mac(s) as a preference pane that coordinates hourly syncs to Google of your iCal and Address Book data. Pricing is fair at $25/year or $65 for a lifetime subscription. Their pricing model is per Google account rather than per device which is a plus if you have more than one Mac.

Prior to starting your first sync with this, it’s always a good idea to backup your data. You can do this in both iCal and Address Book easily by going to File > Export > Archive in each program. Syncing can get messy and having backup takes a few seconds and saves hours of headaches.

Go ahead and start your first sync, it’ll take a while depending on how much data you have. Upon completion, explore iCal and Google Calendar and make sure events are linked to the correct calendars and that any recurring events are as they should be. For your contacts, compare the number of contacts in Google Contacts to the status bar’s count in Address Book. Everything matches up? Great. We’re half way done.

With respect to mobile devices, I have two to worry about: an iPhone 4 and a Droid Incredible (Android 2.2). Since we’re in the Google ecosystem now, the Android part of the equation is simple. Log into the Gmail or Google Apps account and enable syncing for all three categories (Calendar, Contacts and Mail). You’re data is set once you see the icon disappear in the notification bar.

Now onto iPhone. Most people are syncing their Gmail and Google Apps with iPhone incorrectly, perhaps because they don’t know there is a better way. Google has licensed Exchange ActiveSync from Microsoft and uses this as a simple way to get comprehensive PIM syncing working on iOS as part of Google Sync. What you’ll need to do is set up a new mail account in iOS 4. Select “Microsoft Exchange” as the type, use your Gmail username or full Google Apps address as the username, leave the domain blank and use “m.google.com” as the server address and you’re set. Ignore any certificate warnings that pop up and ensure SSL is checked. Give it a few minutes and your data will be synced to iPhone as well. One benefit you’ll notice about this method for accessing Gmail, other than it now syncs your contacts and calendar too, is that mail is now delivered via push instantly. Nifty.

Here are some other steps you may or may not need to worry about. If you have multiple iCal/Google Calendar calendars, you’ll need to manually turn on syncing of these for iPhone as by default, only your initial Google Calendar gets access via Exchange ActiveSync. Go to m.google.com/sync on your iPhone, tap on “Calendars”, and add a checkmark to those you want on your device. You’d also want to disable syncing of your contacts and calendars when linked to iTunes since that will have been obviated by over-the-air syncing. Lastly, for Google Apps users, Google Sync needs to be enabled in order for this to work. You can do this by logging into your “Manage this domain” control panel, clicking on “Service settings” and then “Mobile”. Check the box next to “Enable Google Sync” and you’re set.

One more thing about iPhone and Google via Exchange. When you add new contacts to iPhone, be default it will save them to the phone only in its own address book. Go to “Settings”, “Mail, Contacts, Calendars”, scroll down to “Default Account” and change it to your Exchange ActiveSync account.

That’s it. Your contacts and calendar and mail are all syncing over the air, accessible across your Macs, on the web, and on your mobile devices all the time. Changes on one reflect on the other and you don’t have to worry about plugging in your iPhone for anything other than adding music and updating podcasts.

I’ll cover text capture and file access later this week, but it’s easy: Simplenote for web and iPhone, Notational Velocity for Mac and Andronoter on Android. Don’t touch Evernote with a ten-foot clown pole.

Through resources on the Drupal developer site and code posted by user “foxtrotcharlie”, I’ve created a module you can place in /modules that works with Drupal 5 and can be modified to work with Drupal 4 and 6.

To start out, you’ll need to gain access to phpmyadmin or your tool of choice to alter your site’s SQL database. Edit the string length of “title” to 255 characters in DB table “node” and “node_revision” or any value you wish, but might as well go for the biggest you can.

Once you do this, add the module I supply at the bottom of this post which is all set to go for Drupal 5 installations and should survive new updates of Drupal.

Download: Drupal Maxlength Module

What do you need? A 4GB or larger USB flash drive or hard-drive and a computer with a BIOS that supports booting from a USB device. Almost every computer made in the past three years or so supports this feature. Also, you’ll need your Windows Vista or Windows Server 2008 install disc or ISO (for this, I used a licensed copy from my MSDN subscription).

• Open the Disk Management console (run “diskmgmt.msc”)
• Format your flash drive as FAT32 and set the partition as active/primary.
• Copy the entire Windows disc to the USB storage device – the easiest way is by running “xcopy D:\*.* /s/e/f E:\” at the command prompt (where D: is your optical drive/mounted ISO and E: is the USB flash drive.).

Note: If you are using a large external hard-drive, you’ll want to create a partition smaller than the drive itself since FAT32 has certain size limitations. In my case, I chose to make a 6GB active partition and left the rest unpartitioned.

Remember, this is not only useful for computers with defunct or non-existant optical drives – you can also use this for installing Windows on multiple machines quickly as you’ll find it significantly quicker than reading off a DVD.

I have not tested this with Windows XP, however I see no reason why it would not work. If you encounter issues where you cannot boot successfully from the USB drive after the copy, you might need to run the “bootsect.exe” from the command line. Check MS Knowledgebase for more detailed information on this.

While OS X 10.4 and 10.5 have built-in support for ExpressCard and USB 3G networking devices, it does not give you all the features of the card nor the ability to complete the initial service activation. Earlier this year, Sprint began to offer companion software and drivers for their EV-DO equipment for OS X users called “Sprint SmartView”. The software gives you access to more detail about your usage, what network you’re connected to, and GPS services (which we’ll get into later). With this software, you can now complete data card firmware updates and activate service obviating the use of virtualization of Windows or borrowing a friend’s computer for that. My only real issue with it is that doesn’t act like a Mac application, as you can tell immediately when it installing a desktop shortcut (not a dock shortcut, a desktop shortcut) and by the various interface inconsistencies. Otherwise, it’s a pretty good step by Sprint – you can download the SmartView software here – Sprint Downloads.

However, GPS is the main point of this post. With the new connection manager comes the ability to use the A-GPS functionality of all Sprint EV-DO cards to locate yourself. To use the basic location function, launch the SmartView software and click on the “GPS” drop-down and it will acquire a signal and locate you. You can click the shortcuts there to find yourself on Google Maps and each icon will take you to a different search such as restaurants and Sprint locations near you. Neato. But the most useful function of this would be to get directions and track yourself. Since the software will create a NMEA port on your device that will pipe the location data into another program that can use it. For this tutorial, we’ll use Google Earth since everyone loves Google Earth. The only sticking point here is that to use GPS, you’ll have to subscribe to “Google Earth Plus” which is $20 a year – $1.67 a month, don’t be cheap, pay for it.

To enable NMEA output, click the icon that resembles a ‘play button’. Now, launch Google Earth Plus and wait for it to load completely and log-in. Now go to the “Tools” menu and  and select “GPS”. This will bring up a settings window like the one pictured on the right. Click on the “Realtime” tab and select “NMEA”. From here, you will want to check the “Automatically follow the path” radio box and choose how often you want to poll the card for new location coordinates (six to ten seconds works well). Click “Start” and you’ll see Google Earth pan to your current location and follow you as you move in your car and of course this works on the go as your EV-DO service is more than sufficient to pull down the maps/satellite imagery on the fly.

Google Earth Plus with Realtime GPS

Now you’re ready to use this to get directions and find businesses around you based on your current location anywhere you go with your Mac laptop. Don’t forget that you can also track a trip by saving your path in the “Places” menu. The GPS function does not eat much of your battery, however, Google Earth can be CPU intensive at times, so it might be advantageous to bring a charger or second battery along with you.

Have questions? Leave them in the comments and I’ll try update the post.

It’s a pretty easy fix although.

Open ‘Activity’ Manager and show all processes (even root)
Quit the process named ‘ps’ (you will be asked for admin privileges)

You should do this while the PwnageTool is open. Also, you will need to ensure the folders \<user>\Library\iTunes\Device Support and \<user>\Library\iTunes\iTunes Software Updates  exist on your machine.

To be quite honest, I’m not certain what the ‘ps’ process does and you should always take cautiou when fiddling with processes on your machines; however I have used this will no ill effects however I did restart once I finished ‘pwning’ the phone. Good luck!

EDIT (7/21): This bug has since been fixed in version 2.0.1, read here.

You’ve most likely used Commnand+Tab to switch between applications on your computer, but a similar shortcut, Command+` (the key next the ’1′ key) will switch between application windows. This is quicker than using Expose if you just want to keep flipping back and forth between two large spreadsheets. Continuing with the window management theme, perhaps the most powerful shortcut is Command+H – hiding an application. OS X allows you to hide all and application’s windows until you call bring it back from the dock or by switching to it via Command+Tab. The main use of this is to keep your workspace clear and so that you don’t have to worry about how much you have open at any one time – for me, I have about ten to fourteen applications open at one time, some with multiple windows. Without using Command+H to hide some apps, using Expose would be unwieldly. Another related shortcut is Command+M which minimizes the foremost window. This is convenient if you want to leave some documents open but are otherwise distracting to your current work.

When you have multiple windows associated with an application open, you can close the current one by typing Command+W. This works in the Finder or just about anywhere else. This shortcut, combined with the four others previously mentioned tackles most of the common tasks related to window management in OS X and once you get used to them, will make you more efficient and quicker. The point of using keyboard-based shortcuts is to reduce your reliance on the mouse which in almost all cases is disruptive to your concentration and workflow.

In the next howto, I’ll take on the most useful and powerful application for OS X ever made – Quicksilver.

To do this, create an Automator workflow that starts with “Get Selected Items” so that you can simply highlight a few PDFs in Finder and execute the Automator action on it. Next, choose the “Set PDF Metadata” action and find some field to manipulate. I chose to do “Content Creator” since that doesn’t impact the document at all. Now, save the workflow as a plug-in for Finder. This action achieves the same result as opening the document in Preview and using “Save to PDF” from the Print dialog box.

Now when you want to ‘optimize’ these sluggish PDF documents, you can just select them, right-click and run your Automator action which will overwrite the existing file. It does lead to a file that is 1.5x the file size though.

I’ve included my Automator workflow script to the post for reference. Enjoy.

Automator Workflow – Optimize PDFs (place in /Users/<you>/Library/Workflow/Applications/Finder)

First, quit CoverSutra. Launch Terminal and type or copy and paste the following…

defaults write com.sophiestication.CoverSutra gender 'female'

Once you relaunch, you’ll see the old icon and all will be right in the world again.

For those who haven’t yet seen or used the application, you should definitely try it out. It’s basically an iTunes remote/Last.fm companion that also displays album art on your desktop. Snazzy and incredibly useful when you delve into the keyboard shortcuts. It’s at Sophiestication Software.